Simon Willison’s Weblog

Lots of iCal links

I’m writing a simple events calendar system at the moment, and since I always seem to end up making things more complicated than they should actually be I’ve been investigating using the iCal standard as the file format for storing events (I need a flat-file format due to hosting requirements). I’m particularly interested in the XML flavour of iCal, although it seems to be a lot less popular than the semicolon deliminated original standard. Mainly for my own reference, here are the sites I’ve trawled through this afternoon:

• iCal RFC
• iCal in XML
• iCal XML DTD
• iCal DTD explained
• Mozilla Calendar
• Notes on Mozilla and iCalendar
• iCal Format Tutorial
• W3C Note: Date and Time Formats
• Semantic Web Calendaring vocabularies and usecases
• Explanation of the mapping from iCalendar to XML DTD
• iCal in UML